


Of Gun Shots and Blood Splatters

by catastrophicsetback



Category: Glee
Genre: Gen, Metafiction, School Shootings, Separation Anxiety, Triggers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-12
Updated: 2013-05-12
Packaged: 2017-12-11 14:42:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/799869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catastrophicsetback/pseuds/catastrophicsetback
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam can’t deal with being so alone in his own head, so he creates Evan Evans and prays that it’ll be enough to save him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Gun Shots and Blood Splatters

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warning for a school shooting and separation anxiety. Spoilers for 4x18 and 4x19. This was posted on my tumblr after the episode aired, kinda forgot to upload it here until now.

Being someone he’s not when he doesn’t want to be himself is something Sam has done for as long as he can remember, ever since he was an infant. At first, it was small things, pulling silly faces like a happy person when he was sad inside and telling his parents that  _“Sammy isn’t here right now, he’ll be back tomorrow,”_  when he didn’t want to get in trouble for stealing cookies from the cookie jar.

When he discovered his ability to mimic people’s voices, though, he mostly turned to impressions. As soon as he felt scared, or panicked, or just plain  _sad_ , he’d pull out the first impression he could think off to distract people from himself and the way he felt. He would do them when he was happy, too, but mostly when he wasn’t. Mostly when he just wanted to be someone else, even if only for a few seconds.

The shooting changes everything, though. It messes him up inside, like he’s in a constant state of panic and confusion. It hurts his head and his heart, being so afraid all the time, and he’s so desperate to not be himself that it’s suffocating. 

It doesn’t help that he misses his family, either. They can’t afford to get to Ohio or to get him back to Kentucky, and no amount of conversations on Skype or on the phone can compare to having his family with him. It only makes the panic worse, like he’s a scared little boy lost in the supermarket, running from aisle to aisle in search for his parents. Only he knows that no amount of running will get him to them, and that scares him even more.

All he wants is to feel his father’s arms around him and his mother’s kisses against his forehead, his siblings clinging onto his legs and arms, any part of him they can get a hold of. He misses the way his mom always used to fuss over his hair, and the way his dad would always laugh and tell her  _“leave the kid alone, he looks great.”_  He wants his family so badly, and wants to escape himself and everything about himself at the same time.

So he creates Evan Evans.

He ties the sleeves of an old sweatshirt around his neck, steals one of Blaine’s many pots of hair gel and Blaine’s dad’s old glasses one night when Blaine lets him sleep over. He spends an entire night practising his Australian accent in front of the mirror, with the glasses sitting on his nose and his hair gelled sloppily to the side — he lets himself become Evan, a guy that’s smart and charming and everything Sam wishes he could be, a guy that isn’t haunted with nightmares of gun shots filling empty halls and blood splatters on school lockers, a guy that is now his twin brother, his _family_.

He goes to bed that night happy for the first time since the shooting, excited to finally be someone else, and to have someone around that he can call a brother.

When he goes to school the next day, he realises just how lucky he is to have someone like Brittany for a girlfriend. As soon as he corrects her on his name and tells her that he’s Sam’s twin, she grins and pulls him into a hug, gushing about how Sam has  _“told her all about him”_  and how she’s  _“so excited to finally meet someone as smart as herself.”_

The second comment stings Sam’s heart, but he’s not Sam, he’s Evan now, so that pain isn’t really there at all. At least, that’s what he tells himself.

The other kids in glee take longer to understand, probably because they all know that he’s not really Evan (except he is, he  _is_  Evan, even if he’s Sam at the same time), but they come around. Blaine adjusts the quickest, moving his satchel off the chair beside him and telling him that he was saving the seat for Sam, but that Evan could sit there if he wanted. He sounds totally confused while he says it, almost hesitant to play along, but the effort is enough and the others soon learn to follow Blaine’s lead. 

Soon, however, being Evan gets too suffocating. The pain and the panic Sam feels cuts through his character and the effort it takes to keep being Evan makes him want to cry. It helps when he picks up his phone and has a conversation with ‘Sam’, makes him feel like he’s actually Evan, but as soon as he puts the phone down, the discomfort settles again. So he dashes out and stuffs the glasses and the sweatshirt into his backpack, messes his hair up so it’s not being held back by the gel, and rushes back inside as Sam, grinning wide and waving as he all but skips to his seat.

It feels good, being Sam again, for all of about a minute. Then the panic really seizes him, clenching his gut and disturbing his head, and he’s dying to escape himself, so he does. Runs back out, puts the glasses back on and wraps the sweatshirt around his shoulders, smooths his hair back into place.

He lets it continue like that, constantly changing back and forth between one twin and the other, answering pretend phone calls and running out of rooms so the other twin can be around for certain conversations. Sometimes he feels stupid for it, when he notices his friends looking at him like he’s insane, but he doesn’t know how else to deal with the mess in his head and it’s not like anyone is calling him out on what he’s doing.

It’s not like he could just stop, anyway. He can’t leave himself alone with no one else to be and no family around to seek comfort in. Evan is the only person he has, the only other person he can be right now, and he needs him more than he’s ever needed anyone before.

So he keeps up the act, being Evan and being Sam and being Evan, exhausting himself and everyone around him with the constant switching, and he doesn’t plan on stopping until he has his family with him and he can sleep through the night again.

He doesn’t know if he can cope any other way.


End file.
